Leitch presents a comprehensive history of American literary criticism from the appearance of Marxist criticism in the 1930s to the development of left-leaning positions in the period from the 1960s to the mid 1980s. He sketches the broad historical and intellectual context in which each critical school emerged, and covers all significant groups of the past 55 years. They include feminist criticism, black aesthetics, the Chicago School, the New Critics, hermeneutics, reader response criticism, myth criticism and the deconstructionists. ISBN 0-231-06426-8: $45.00.